


helplessness

by Anonymous



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Do Not Archive, Elias is bad at emotions, Eye Trauma, Jon over here in the anti-coma, M/M, Only able to observe, Peter is a dick, Psychological Torture, Torture, Torturing one character to hurt another, light touches of Lonely, so is jon, wound fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-20 07:02:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16132100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Peter visits Jon's body in the hospital in order to teach Elias a lesson.  Jon watches.





	helplessness

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to various people, in particular Kyros.

            Jon wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten here. He’d been somewhere else previously; he was almost sure of that. But now—now he was stood (or he thought he was stood?) in a hospital room, staring down at a body on a bed, a body with graying hair, lying quite still beneath the sheets. Across the room, the white walls of the hospital dimmed and blurred and melted into somewhere quite different. Elias sat on the edge of a small cot, staring intently at the form on the bed, and the man Jon now realized was standing beside it.

            “What _shall_ I do to him, Elias?” Lukas asked.

            “What the fuck do you mean?” Jon demanded, and he didn’t know whether Lukas wasn’t responding because he hadn’t heard him, or because he was simply electing to ignore him.

            Elias made no response, other than to resettle himself in his cell. “I know you can hear me,” Lukas said. “I’ve done you quite the favor, Elias, letting you hide out there by yourself in that prison cell. But I’m not certain how much you’ve thought it through.”

            He put his hand on Jon’s chest, and Jon shivered at the weird sensation that shot through him in its wake. The injuries from the explosion had been taped up, and in his current state, he wasn’t even sure he ought to be able to feel his body, but he felt those fingers, a weird, phantom sensation, as if he was feeling it from a very long distance. And he _definitely_ felt it when Lukas reached out and ripped the gauze apart efficiently and then put one hand down into the mess of deep lacerations covering Jon’s chest and slid his fingers through.

            Jon choked, struggling against the pain and nausea, instinctively reaching to his chest, but his hands could find nothing to hold onto.

            “Peter,” Elias said tightly. “I don’t think this is necessary.”

            “Really?” Lukas asked. “You’re slipping, Elias.” He wriggled an exploratory finger somewhere in the vicinity of Jon’s chest cavity, and Jon’s mouth opened as he struggled to scream, but no sound came out. “I could do anything to him that I wanted, couldn’t I? And what would you do to stop me?”

            “This is highly unprofessional,” Elias said in a cool voice. Jon tried to focus on his voice instead of the obscene feeling of Lukas’s fingers slowly twisting inside him, the horrifying sensation of utter helplessness, knowing that Lukas absolutely could and would do whatever he liked to Jon. Not because he had anything against Jon, not because Jon was even remotely important to him, but simply because he wanted to teach Elias a lesson. Did he even know that Jon was aware of any of this?

            Elias knew. Elias’s apparently disinterested gaze flickered briefly from Jon’s body, lying quite still on the bed, to Jon’s eyes, surely invisible, surely non-existent, as non-existent as the rest of Jon, his gaze as ineffectual as any of his movements.

            Lukas was humming quietly to himself as he continued to slowly explore Jon’s frozen injuries. Jon tried to grit his teeth, but, although he was fairly sure he was making the motions, he could feel none of the effects, just the same stomach-churning sensation of intrusion as Lukas moved down his body. A hand landed on his cock, and Jon yelped in indignation, wanting to shut his eyes, but that was one thing he would not do, no matter what. He let himself glance away from Lukas, briefly, taking comfort in the minute tightening of Elias’s jaw.

            At least the sensations, unpleasant and nauseating as they were, were a little muted. It wasn’t the sheer bright pain he should have been feeling, or the overwhelming physical sensation of Lukas’s hand. Probably as a result of his distance from his own body, or maybe because Lukas was who he was; either way, it was bad enough. The pain warred with the other sensations, because Lukas’s left hand had now reached the deep injury at the top of Jon’s left thigh, the place where a piece of shrapnel had taken a huge divot out of Jon’s flesh, and Jon shivered as Lukas’s fingers ran around the edge of the injury as his other hand jerked at Jon’s flaccid member, as unresponsive as the rest of Jon’s body, but the reminder of Jon’s body’s technical inability to respond in a biologically reasonable way only made the whole situation worse.

            With no warning, Lukas thrust two fingers deep into Jon’s thigh. Pain burst in front of Jon’s eyes, and he thought he was screaming. He might have begged if he thought it would do any good; if he had thought he would be understood or—

            “Please.” Elias’s voice, hoarse, rough with distaste, his teeth grinding audibly against one another. “I am _asking_ you to stop.”           

            “And that’s all you can do, isn’t it? Ask me?” The fingers twisted, and Jon jerked, a sob tearing its way out of his mouth. He couldn’t really tell anymore if he was lying on the bed, standing beside it, or kneeling on the floor at Lukas’s feet. He shouldn’t be able to feel this at all, he thought wildly; it seemed so incredibly unfair to be anchored to a corpse, a corpse that shouldn’t be able to transmit the nerve signals to the brain and yet was, in defiance of every damn law of biology. “Can he feel this, do you think?” Lukas asked, with a slow, wide smile. “He doesn’t seem to be enjoying it much.”

            Another painful twist at Jon’s cock. Jon wanted to sink his teeth into his own wrist to distract himself with a cleaner sort of agony, but he couldn’t. The horrible sensation of remote and floating helplessness made him writhe insofar as he was capable of it.

            “You have _made your point_.”

            “Perhaps,” Lukas agreed jovially. “You really are quite protective of him, aren’t you, Elias? I wonder how much your god approves of that?”

            “I am afraid you know very little about what my god does and does not approve of.” Elias’s eyes flicked back to Jon’s again, and Jon wished he could read the expression in them rather than simply cataloguing it. “My feelings about Jon are, in any case, irrelevant.”

            “How does it feel, the safety?” Lukas asked. “Safe and alone in your cell, Elias?” He withdrew his fingers from Jon’s thigh, and Jon gasped in a sigh of relief, just in time for Lukas to look at the blood and fluids covering his hand and push it into Jon’s mouth. The taste was foul, and Jon’s stomach heaved, nausea growing without bound, because he couldn’t throw up. He couldn’t respond. The impossible distance between himself and the body he’d occupied since birth was almost worse than anything else, except possibly that soft, almost inaudible noise that Elias made.

            “It feels as if you are trying to tell me that my strategy was flawed,” Elias clipped out. “And, as I said, you have made your point.”

            “Not if you think you determine when I have or haven’t.” His fingers moved in and out of Jon’s mouth, and Jon couldn’t manufacture tears, but he sobbed dryly.

            “Peter,” Elias gritted out.

            “I think he does know what’s happening. I think you’re watching him react to this. How oddly human of you, Elias.”

            Elias made a bitter, scoffing noise. “Really, Peter? I wouldn’t have thought the rest of the world’s obsession with humanity would extend to you. Humanity is not a relevant or even particularly definable variable.” His eyes were not watching Lukas; they lingered on Jon.

            Lukas made an interested noise but withdrew his fingers from Jon’s mouth, and Jon gasped with relief. “Think about what I’ve said, Elias. Consider how long you actually want to be away from your Institute.” His eyes flickered down to Jon’s still-limp form. “Consider how long you feel it appropriate to leave your Archivist alone.” He reached out, grasped Jon’s chin, and moved his head from side to side. “Consider how long until someone less sympathetic than I am comes along.”

            “Oh, _fuck_ you,” Jon told him, and he heard Elias snort with surprised laughter suddenly, a sound he immediately disguised as a cough.

            Lukas’s eyebrows went up. “Hm,” he said, brightly, and he bent down over Jon’s form and laid a thumb over each eye.

            Elias actually jerked violently up from his seat. “Don’t—” was the last thing Jon heard before Lukas pressed down.

~

            Everything was blurry and strange. Jon was not sure how long he’d been wandering, or where. He had a vague notion of pain and rushing darkness, like being washed down an invisible river. Now, he was quite pleased to realize, the blurriness was fading, and he was in a small room. It was one that his mind told him he recognized, although it took him until his eyes were able to resolve the small sad smear of grey along one side into a short, curly-haired man in a suit for him to recognize Elias, curled on his side in his cell.

            It was strange to see him like this, Jon thought, his suit crumpled, the slump of his shoulders exhausted, almost despairing. “Elias?” he said, and Elias rolled over and sat up, staring at him. His eyes were faintly bloodshot, and his hair hung lankly into his eyes. He had loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt: Jon had never seen him do that before, and it made him look as vulnerable as if he’d been naked.           

            There was a slight hitch in Elias’s breath as he breathed out, although his voice was measured when he spoke. “Ah, Jon. I am glad you seem to have—recovered.”

            A somewhat mirthless laugh jerked its way out of Jon’s throat. “I’m impressed you managed to understate and overstate the situation at the same time.”

            “Well, what can I say,” Elias spread his hands out in front of him, palms up, a theatrical gesture like a magician conjuring something from thin air. “I am a man of many talents.”

            “And many enemies,” Jon said shortly. In the next moment, he was across the room and looking down at Elias.

            “Yes,” Elias agreed. “I—I’m sorry, Jon. I miscalculated.”

            “Yeah.” Jon was sitting on the bed beside him, so close that he ought to be able to feel Elias’s warmth pressing against his side, but there was nothing. No sensation at all. “Also, your friend Peter Lukas is a bastard.”

            Heavy sigh. “Yes. Your development is encouraging, though.”

            “You sound very encouraged.”

            “I do, actually, care about you. I am aware that none of you believes it, but I do not enjoy harm coming to my people. Losing Tim was a wrench, and he was utterly insufferable. You are not.” Elias looked down at his hands as he spoke.

            “That’s unusually forthright, coming from you.” Jon crossed his arms, and Elias looked up at him, eyes flashing.

            “If I can give you nothing else in the way of recompense, I can at least give you _data_ ,” he spat, halfway between anger and some other emotion Jon wasn’t quite able to identify.

            Words swirled in Jon’s head, some comforting, some angry. He could not settle on any of them, and in the end, he sighed and said nothing. They sat beside one another, unable to touch each other, unable to feel each other, able only to observe, and the silence stretched between them.


End file.
